The signs are unmistakable: denial, frustration, bargaining, acceptance. We aren’t talking about the latest self-help book or Kübler-Ross. These are some of the many phases organizations go through in their steps towards Digital Asset Management consciousness.

It’s not that those working directly with DAM systems aren’t desperate to hire. A host of posts on many forums acknowledges that a DAM system without dedicated, full-time staffing will most likely fail. Why spend millions to buy, launch and populate a DAM system without the staff to make sure it works?

On a deeper level, the trend toward cloud solutions is inherent in the nature of a connected media ecosystem. Increasingly, the value in our media comes from the connectivity, and DAM has to be cloud-native in order to work effectively as a connected system.

One of their big challenges is the need for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). How do you actually get these systems to work together? I need a place where I can apply rules to govern the asset usage. Digital Rights Management Tools are not tightly integrated into the DAM solutions.”

There is no victory in a content strategy founded in isolation. Digital Asset Management (DAM) initiatives cannot be established as an island, or an enterprise silo waiting to be filled. Instead integrate them socially into various areas of the enterprise or linked technologically to other systems.

Any organization looking to manage and exploit its knowledge more effectively can't afford to ignore metadata creation. Metadata's application, however, can't stop at creation. Organizations must continually update, manage and exploit it in order to provide optimal content and knowledge management opportunities.

Lisa McIntyre said her company used to manage its digital assets with a clipboard and paper. "I kid you not," she recalled, noting how people would write down the file they were borrowing and sign their name. "Who knows if anyone was even looking at that? Who knows if the files ever came back?"

The decision to implement a Digital Asset Management system is a vital step to gaining operational and intellectual control of digital assets. Any successful DAM implementation requires more than just new technology; it requires a foundation for digital strategy. The right DAM solution ensures that assets can generate revenue, increase efficiencies and meet new and emerging market opportunities.

The correct answer is that it depends on the policies you’ve developed to govern your DAM. Just like it depends on your goals. And it depends also on the types of assets you want in your DAM. In fact, it depends on all sorts of things that won’t get you any closer to making a decision about what to do with a file that’s beneath your mouse pointer at any given moment.

While the complexity of implementing DAM systems gets underestimated, the scope of that problem can be more easily defined than user adoption and usually involves intense bursts of activity that come and go.

Take a collaborative approach when tackling a large project such as a new DAM system. Work closely with stakeholders from a wide range of teams across the organization to identify the goals and problems the DAM system should solve.Finding the right vendor is a challenging task. Don't take it lightly. With hundreds of vendors filling the market, just starting this process can be daunting.

A personalized customer experience requires a deep understanding of your customer and the ability to quickly bring together the right content to meet their needs. The right content is a combination of text and rich assets. While many brands think about eliminating silos across content repositories to get the best content, they still often manage their digital assets in a silo. It’s time to rethink how you manage digital assets in your web content management platform (WCM) to improve your ability to respond quickly and deliver rich, consistent customer experiences.

Over the last year, an ongoing debate has taken place in the DAM industry about innovation. The consensus is that innovation is in retreat and DAM software is becoming increasingly homogeneous.In our coverage at DAM News, we see a vendor's new product release as an accurate signal of intent — the time and money involved in modifying applications ensures a certain level of commitment on the part of the vendor.

There’s much ado these days about “personalization” and “contextualization,” and being able to present different content to different visitors based on personas or other criteria, such as the visitor’s current location or Web browsing history. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to present the same content formatted the same way to the same visitor across multiple Web properties?

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